The National Catholic Register portal reports that the French Parliament has definitively adopted legislation establishing a “digital age of majority” at 15 years old, banning minors from accessing social media platforms and mandating universal age verification mechanisms that effectively institute a regime of generalized digital surveillance. The measure, championed by President Emmanuel Macron since 2017 and passed with overwhelming parliamentary support, extends the existing smartphone ban in schools to high schools and aligns with a broader European Union strategy for digital identity verification. Critics, including digital rights groups and the European Center for Law and Justice, warn that the law constitutes “generalized surveillance disguised as child protection” and threatens to become a universal identity verification regime. Early data from Australia’s similar ban suggests minimal impact on actual youth usage, with 85% of affected adolescents circumventing restrictions via fake accounts and private browsers. The article, reported by EWTN correspondent Solène Tadié, frames the measure as a pioneering child protection effort while noting civil liberties concerns. This legislative act manifests the totalitarian essence of the secular state: usurping the God-given authority of parents over the education and moral formation of their children, while erecting a panopticon of digital surveillance under the pretext of protecting the very children it subjects to a pagan, secularized education system.
Usurpation of Parental Authority: The Secular State as Pater Familias
The cited article reports that the French Parliament has “definitively passed a law banning children under the age of 15 from accessing social media,” presented as a “child protection measure against all the risks associated with the use of social media, from addiction to bullying and abuse.” This legislative act constitutes a brazen usurpation of the ius divinum (divine right) of parents over the education and moral formation of their offspring. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Divini Illius Magistri (1929), teaches with unmistakable clarity: “The family holds, therefore, directly from the Creator the mission and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right inalienable because inseparably joined to a strict obligation, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the State, and therefore inviolable on the part of any power on earth” (Divini Illius Magistri, 1929). The French Republic, a Masonic construct born of the Revolution of 1789, has never recognized this divine right. By legislating a “digital age of majority,” the secular state arrogates to itself the role of pater familias, determining the age at which a child may access the digital public square, thereby displacing the father and mother who, before God, bear the grave obligation to form their children’s intellects and wills in virtue and truth.
The article notes that “responsibility for verifying users’ ages falls to the platforms themselves, which must offer at least two different verification methods.” This delegation of parental authority to corporate entities—Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat—under state coercion constitutes a double usurpation: the state usurps the parents, and the corporations usurp the state’s delegated tyranny. Pope Leo XIII, in Sapientiae Christianae (1890), condemned the error that “the State should be without God” and affirmed that “the Church and the State are not equal, nor are they on the same level; the Church is above the State, as the soul is above the body.” The French law, emanating from a rigorously laicist republic that formally separated Church and State in 1905, manifests the laïcité condemned by Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas (1925): “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed, because the main reason why some have the right to command and others have the duty to obey was removed” (Quas Primas, 31). The French state, having no authority from God, derives its “right to command” from the will of the majority—a purely human, volatile, and tyrannical foundation.
The Panopticon of Laïcité: Universal Surveillance as “Child Protection”
The article reveals the true nature of this legislation: “the age verification requirements — intended to target minors — entail identity checks for everyone.” The mechanism described—”a trusted third party would verify a user’s age from an ID document or bank card and issue an anonymous token confirming only whether the user is over or under 15″—is the architecture of a universal digital identity system. The article quotes La Quadrature du Net and the Conseil national du numérique warning that the law amounts to “generalized surveillance disguised as child protection.” The European Center for Law and Justice warns that “France and the European Commission are each independently pushing to generalize identity checks across the EU under the banner of online safety policy.”
This is the realization of the Masonic ideal: a universal, biometric, digital identity system under the control of the secular state and its corporate partners. Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus Errorum (1864), condemned the proposition that “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (Error 55). The French law is the bitter fruit of that separation: a state that recognizes no higher law than its own will, constructing a surveillance apparatus that would have made the Comité de Salut Public blush. The “double anonymity” principle is a technological fig leaf; the infrastructure created—trusted third parties, identity verification tokens, platform compliance mandates—is the infrastructure of the Antichrist’s universal control system, foreshadowing the “mark of the beast” (Apoc. 13:16-17) whereby “no man could buy or sell, but he that had the mark.”
The article notes that “enforcement will unfold in two different stages. New accounts will be subject to age checks starting Sept. 1, while existing accounts belonging to minors under 15 will have until Jan. 1, 2027, before they are suspended.” This phased implementation is the classic totalitarian technique of the “boiling frog”: normalize the infrastructure, then expand its scope. Today, age verification for social media; tomorrow, digital ID for banking, healthcare, travel, and eventually, participation in the economy. The European Commission’s parallel development of an “EU-wide age-verification tool” confirms the supranational scope of this project.
The Illusion of Protection: Secular State as Corrupter of Youth
The article’s framing—”child protection measure against all the risks associated with the use of social media, from addiction to bullying and abuse”—exposes the hypocrisy of the secular state. The French Republic, since the Ferry Laws of the 1880s, has monopolized the education of children in godless, secular schools where the name of Jesus Christ is banished, where evolution is taught as dogma, where sexual perversion is normalized under the guise of “education à la sexualité,” and where the very concept of sin is erased. Pope Pius XI, in Divini Illius Magistri, condemns the “naturalistic” education of the state: “There is no true education which is not wholly directed to man’s last end, and in the present order of Providence, there is no true education which is not wholly supernatural… Every method of education founded, wholly or in part, on the denial or forgetfulness of original sin and of grace, and relying on the sole powers of human nature, is unsound” (Divini Illius Magistri, 1929).
The French state corrupts the souls of children daily in its schools, then claims to “protect” them from the digital sewer that the same godless culture produces. The article notes the extension of the “smartphone ban in middle schools to high schools starting in the 2026 school year.” This is the state managing the symptoms of the disease it created. A truly Catholic state would not ban smartphones in schools; it would ban the godless schools themselves, restoring the Catholic Church’s monopoly on education, as taught by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus (Error 47: “The best theory of civil society requires that popular schools… should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority… and fully subjected to the civil and political power”) and Pope Leo XIII in Sapientiae Christianae: “The Church… has the right to educate the young… The State cannot prevent the Church from fulfilling this duty.”
The article mentions that “Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias, along with open-source software and educational platforms, are explicitly exempted.” This exemption reveals the ideological core: the state permits access to the secular, naturalistic, often anti-Catholic content of Wikipedia and “educational platforms” (which propagate gender ideology, evolutionism, and historical revisionism) while restricting access to social media where—despite the filth—Catholic truth might still be proclaimed, where traditional communities might form, where the Traditio might be transmitted. The secular state protects its own propaganda organs.
Ineffectiveness as Feature, Not Bug: The Australian Precedent
The article cites data from Australia’s similar ban: “roughly 85% of Australians aged 12 to 15 were still using restricted platforms, the most common workarounds being fake accounts and private browsers.” The law “had produced no substantial early drop in social media use among adolescents in its first three months.” The article notes that “researchers cautioned that legislative effects can take time to appear and called for longer-term evaluation.”
This ineffectiveness is not a bug; it is a feature. The goal is not to protect children—if it were, the state would address the root causes: the dissolution of the family, the pornographic culture, the godless schools, the absence of paternal authority. The goal is to normalize universal digital identity verification. The “workarounds” (fake accounts, private browsers) will be used as the pretext for the next legislative step: mandatory biometric verification, hardware-level attestation, the elimination of anonymity entirely. As the article notes, “critics… argue the system’s implementation is far less safe than officials suggest… the mechanics of age verification remain largely undefined barely a month before the law takes effect.” The vagueness is intentional; it allows for the incremental tightening of the noose.
The Conciliar Church’s Complicity: EWTN and the “Digital Age of Majority”
The article is published by the National Catholic Register, an outlet of EWTN, the media empire founded by the late Mother Angelica, now fully integrated into the structures of the conciliar sect. The reporter, Solène Tadié, is described as “Europe Correspondent for EWTN News… previously worked on the Culture section of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s Italian-language daily newspaper… author of a forthcoming book-length interview with Cardinal Péter Erdő… working on a book on the renewal of the Catholic faith in Europe.” This is the voice of the neo-church, the “Church of the New Advent,” reporting on a Masonic legislative achievement with the tone of a neutral observer, noting “concerns” but fundamentally accepting the premise that the secular state has the legitimate authority to regulate the digital lives of children.
The article quotes the minister delegate, Anne Le Hénanff: “France is leading the way in Europe by becoming the first country to establish a ‘digital age of majority’ to better protect our children online.” No Catholic voice is quoted denouncing the usurpation of parental rights. No reference to Divini Illius Magistri, Quas Primas, or the Syllabus Errorum. The conciliar church, having embraced Dignitatis Humanae (1965) and Gaudium et Spes (1965), has surrendered the Social Kingship of Christ. It accepts the secular state as a legitimate partner, a “secular arm” for the common good, rather than recognizing it as the civitas diaboli (city of the devil) described by St. Augustine (De Civitate Dei, XIV, 28), which lives according to the flesh and opposes the civitas Dei.
Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas, instituted the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the “plague of our time, so-called laicism, its errors and impious activities” (Quas Primas, 24). He wrote: “It began with the denial of the reign of Christ the Lord over all nations; the right of the Church to teach, to make laws, to govern peoples… was denied. And then, little by little, the Christian religion began to be put on a par with false religions and shamelessly placed on the same level with them” (Quas Primas, 24). The French law is the direct fruit of this laicism. The conciliar church’s silence on the usurpation of parental rights, its collaboration with the secular state on “digital ethics,” its embrace of “synodality” as a surrogate for the Kingship of Christ—all constitute a betrayal of the Social Kingship of Our Lord.
The Duty of Catholic Resistance: Non Possumus
The true Catholic response to this law is not “compliance with age verification” or “advocacy for better parental controls.” It is the radical rejection of the secular state’s authority over the family and the child. Pope Pius XI teaches: “Men united in societies are no less subject to the authority of Christ than individuals… Let rulers of states therefore not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ, but let them fulfill this duty themselves and with their people, if they wish to maintain their authority inviolate and contribute to the increase of their homeland’s happiness” (Quas Primas, 31). The French state refuses this obedience. Therefore, its laws touching the divine rights of the family have no binding force in conscience. Lex injusta non est lex (an unjust law is no law), teaches St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 96, a. 4).
Catholic parents in France—and everywhere the “digital age of majority” spreads—have the grave duty to resist. They must refuse the age verification systems. They must educate their children at home or in truly Catholic schools (those adhering to the pre-1958 Tradition, rejecting the conciliar sect). They must form their children in the knowledge and love of Christ the King, so that no digital panopticon, no secular law, no Masonic surveillance state can separate them from the Kingdom of God. As Pope Pius XI wrote in Quas Primas: “If the kingdom of Christ… receives, as it should, all nations under its sway, there is no reason to despair of the peace which the King of Peace came to bring on earth” (Quas Primas, 20). The peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ is the only alternative to the tyranny of the Antichrist in the kingdom of Satan. The French law is a stone in the edifice of that tyranny. Catholics must be the living stones of the contrary edifice: Ecclesia militans, the Church Militant, professing the Social Kingship of Christ the King, rejecting the claims of the secular state, and forming their children for Heaven, not for the digital panopticon.
“Regnavit a ligno Deus” — God has reigned from the wood (of the Cross). (Ven. Bede, Homiliae). Let us cleave to that Cross, and to the King who reigns from it, and no earthly power—French Republic, European Commission, or digital Leviathan—shall prevail against the rights of the Christian family.
Source:
France Becomes First European Country to Ban Social Media for Minors Under 15 (ncregister.com)
Date: 22.07.2026